About Me

Gregg Walker is a Harlem Resident and 1997 graduate of Yale Law School who worked as an investment banker for 9 years and was the Vice President of Strategy and Mergers & Acquisitions at Viacom for 3 years. Gregg served as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Sony from 2009 to 2016, and he launched his own private investing firm in July 2016 (www.gawalker.co). Gregg was chosen in 2010 by Crain's as one of NYC's 40 Under 40 Rising Stars (http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/40under40/profiles/2010/gregg-walker). Gregg is a Deacon at Abyssinian Baptist Church and served as the chairman of the Board of the Harlem YMCA. He has served on the Boards of movie studio MGM and music publishing companies Sony/ATV and EMI Music Publishing. He is also a Board member of Harlem RBI and Derek Jeter's Turn 2 Foundation. He is a former Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a representative of the US at the 2002 Young Leaders Conference of the American Council on Germany. Gregg is also a member of many other foundations and community organizations.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Ethics Challenges from Bloomberg and Housing Discrimination Persists

In a stunning move, Mayor Bloomberg hired an ethics-challenged campaign aid to a senior position in the Department of Education, and we separately see fresh evidence of racial discrimination in housing availability in New York City.

Before this appointee became a part of the Bloomberg campaign for a third term as Mayor, she helped push through the City Council the change to the City Charter that allowed Bloomberg to seek a third term. At the time, this new appointee was working for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, but she violated the law in that role by soliciting donations from unions for Speaker Quinn while working on legislation related to unions for Speaker Quinn.

The Mayor's double-standard is both stunning and infuriating. He attacked former Comptroller Bill Thompson repeatedly for "pay to play" politics - asserting that Thompson's willingness to accept campaign donations from individuals doing business with the City made Thompson unacceptable as a Mayoral candidate. It was a particularly cynical campaign tactic for a self-funded candidate who did not need to accept any campaign donations. Because the new Department of Education appointee's ethics violations were made on behalf of an ally of the Mayor, because that same appointee helped the Mayor gain the right to seek a third term, and because that appointee worked on Bloomberg's campaign for a third term, the Mayor sees no problem with appointing an admitted ethics law violator. He says that she made a "mistake" and pay her fines, so we should all ignore the violation of the law and move forward.

We live in 2010. Yet, racial discrimination in housing continues to persist in NYC.

Last week, two communities in the Bronx were accused of racial discrimination in a law suit filed in federal court in Manhattan. The Fair Housing Justice Center filed the suit after sending "test" couples to seek housing in the two Bronx communities. While the two communities require reference letters from at least three existing residents of those two communities, the white test couple, after saying that they knew no one who lived in the communities, was shown multiple potential housing options and told that the reference letter requirement could be ignored. The Black test couple was refused the opportunity to see any housing options and was told that their inability to identify existing residents to write reference letters would prove fatal to their efforts to join either of these communities.

The suit says that 2000 Census figures show that while blacks account for 35 percent of owner-occupied homes in the Bronx, they account for less than 1 percent of the 1,100 homes in Edgewater Park and Silver Beach Gardens. Diane L. Houk, a lawyer representing the Fair Housing Justice Center, and also its former executive director, said the requirement of three reference letters from existing owners “sounds neutral at first, but has a discriminatory impact on nonwhites.”

As we in NYC face our examples racial discrimination in housing, we need to be vigilant in finding an eliminating racial discrimination throughout our city.